“…Although it is much more rich and nuanced than commonly supposed (Jetten & Mols, ; Newman, ), Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann as a man who was focused narrowly on the bureaucratic challenges that he faced without concern for the broader implications of his actions proved to be enormously influential (Miller, , ). Most particularly, it provided a sharp focus for Milgram's evolving understanding of his participants’ behaviour, such that in the Introduction to his 1974 book he observed:After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine.…”
Section: Conventional Theoretical Analysis Of the Milgram Studies: Thmentioning
This study examines the reactions of participants in Milgram's 'Obedience to Authority' studies to reorient both theoretical and ethical debate. Previous discussion of these reactions has focused on whether or not participants were distressed. We provide evidence that the most salient feature of participants' responses - and the feature most needing explanation - is not their lack of distress but their happiness at having participated. Drawing on material in Box 44 of Yale's Milgram archive we argue that this was a product of the experimenter's ability to convince participants that they were contributing to a progressive enterprise. Such evidence accords with an engaged followership model in which (1) willingness to perform unpleasant tasks is contingent upon identification with collective goals and (2) leaders cultivate identification with those goals by making them seem virtuous rather than vicious and thereby ameliorating the stress that achieving them entails. This analysis is inconsistent with Milgram's own agentic state model. Moreover, it suggests that the major ethical problem with his studies lies less in the stress that they generated for participants than in the ideologies that were promoted to ameliorate stress and justify harming others.
“…Although it is much more rich and nuanced than commonly supposed (Jetten & Mols, ; Newman, ), Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann as a man who was focused narrowly on the bureaucratic challenges that he faced without concern for the broader implications of his actions proved to be enormously influential (Miller, , ). Most particularly, it provided a sharp focus for Milgram's evolving understanding of his participants’ behaviour, such that in the Introduction to his 1974 book he observed:After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine.…”
Section: Conventional Theoretical Analysis Of the Milgram Studies: Thmentioning
This study examines the reactions of participants in Milgram's 'Obedience to Authority' studies to reorient both theoretical and ethical debate. Previous discussion of these reactions has focused on whether or not participants were distressed. We provide evidence that the most salient feature of participants' responses - and the feature most needing explanation - is not their lack of distress but their happiness at having participated. Drawing on material in Box 44 of Yale's Milgram archive we argue that this was a product of the experimenter's ability to convince participants that they were contributing to a progressive enterprise. Such evidence accords with an engaged followership model in which (1) willingness to perform unpleasant tasks is contingent upon identification with collective goals and (2) leaders cultivate identification with those goals by making them seem virtuous rather than vicious and thereby ameliorating the stress that achieving them entails. This analysis is inconsistent with Milgram's own agentic state model. Moreover, it suggests that the major ethical problem with his studies lies less in the stress that they generated for participants than in the ideologies that were promoted to ameliorate stress and justify harming others.
“…This was that despite being psychologically tortured (by the potentiality of physical torture), a strikingly high percentage of Milgram's participants managed to extricate themselves from the situation. That is to say , far from being simply an important element to “complete” the picture (Jetten & Mols, ; Reicher et al, , p. 398), resistance in the face of the perception of a criminally destructive authority (embodied both by the experimenter and the “victim” colluding with him) may have been the very conceptual core of the Milgram experiments.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…590–591;Reicher et al, , p. 399; Reicher & Haslam, , p. 168), once again positing a gap between the “findings” (and the legacy) and the “explanation”. And as the “what happened” and the “why it happened” become separated, the findings themselves continue to hold more or less the same canonical image and meaning as attributed to them by Milgram: representing the extraordinary “willingness of people to inflict serious physical harm on others” (cf., Jetten & Mols, , p. 587; Reicher et al, , p. 395).…”
Section: Two Waves Of Criticismmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Yet, this means that as one (i.e., the explanatory) aspect of Milgram's legacy becomes completely transformed, another one (i.e., the meaning of the findings, with all their inevitable moral purport) remains untouched or enhanced even. Hence Reicher and Haslam's repeated claim that Milgram's experiments constitute a “powerful phenomenon in search of a compelling explanation” (cf., Jetten & Mols, , pp. 590–591;Reicher et al, , p. 399; Reicher & Haslam, , p. 168), once again positing a gap between the “findings” (and the legacy) and the “explanation”.…”
The paper seeks to re-conceptualize Stanley Milgram's (in) famous experiments on willing obedience by drawing solely on Milgram's own contemporary account. It identifies a substantial incongruence between the findings Milgram presented (i.e., his description of the experiments) and the meaning he imputed to them (i.e., his interpretation of the experiments). It argues that instead of operationalizing the concepts he claimed to operationalize -legitimate authority, embodied morality and willing obedience -, Milgram's description suggests that the operative forces in the experiments were an illegitimate authority and acts which in effect collude with that authority. As a result, the paper concludes that what the experimental findings represented was not so much obedience out of choice, but out of coercion. Thus, the paper seeks to redirect the conceptual-moral focus of the findings from the participants who "shockingly" obeyed to those who managed to resist the coercive force of the total experimental situation.
“…This is particularly the case in trying to establish the extent to which perpetrators acted as they did not only because they were obedient (or would not run the risks of disobedience) but because of what the German writer Dorothee Frank has called an "absence of restraint," in which acts which would have been regarded as criminal by the perpetrator are sanctioned by the fact that some form of permission has been given (Frank, 2006). This involves the concept of competing "moral universes" through which the normative or natural morality governing how perpetrators would behave (i.e., murder is wrong) is set aside not because of blind obedience, but because of changes, often temporary and historically specific, in the individual's structure of moral reference (for similar arguments by psychologists, see Jetten & Mols, 2014;Reicher, Haslam, & Rath, 2008) This change is likely to happen at two levels for perpetration on this scale to be possible. First, a change in the moral imperatives that determine the way in which the state and the wider community interpret moral choice.…”
For historians the Holocaust is among the most complex historical situations inFor historians the Holocaust is among the most complex historical situations in which to try to explain perpetrator behavior. This is partly because the Holocaust differs from other forms of mass killing because of its long-term, systematic, and controlled nature, and partly because the number of men (no women were actually involved in carrying out the face-to-face killing) who played a direct part in the genocide was very great, suggesting that any analysis of why they behaved the way they did must rely on a variety of explanations rather than a generic core (Lower, 2013). The most difficult methodological problem lies in the nature of the evidence. Much of the work on reconstructing the motivation of perpetrators in the Holocaust has relied on cross-examination material taken from participants
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